Saying Grace, Raising Hell

February 26, 2025

Barely a month after Trump’s inauguration and the onslaught of lawlessness, terror, meanness, incompetence, and stupidity is doing what it was supposed to do: it is inundating the country so thoroughly that it’s sometimes difficult to know how to respond or what merits a response.

But something else is beginning to happen. People, far from giving up, playing dead, colluding, enabling, and collapsing are beginning in greater numbers each day to rise up, resist, and—so far—peacefully rebel.

When I was mentoring theological reflection groups in the 80’s, our process included a step for identifying the issue at hand with some passage of scripture or tradition that addressed it. So frequently did the story of Peter’s denial of Jesus on the night of the latter’s being handed over to the authorities that we’d automatically put down on the flip chart “P.D.” as a textual connection. Peter’s denial seemed to be an apt moniker for the ever-present dynamic of denial that ran through incident after incident on which we reflected.

Almost as frequent was the story of the cleansing of the Temple, when Jesus drove out of the holy precincts the money-changers and their inventory, overturning tables and scourging the scoundrels with a homemade whip. Each time an incident either recalled or implied anger, that story was the textual anchor par excellence.

The current political situation in the United States seems to me to evoke those two stories. Although I have no data to offer, my intuition tells me that there’s plenty of denial going on. The clearest example I see is on Capitol Hill. If it isn’t denial, then it is either plain stupidity or willful complicity with the effort to effectively shred the Constitution and the rule of law of which it is the fundament. But it isn’t just Congress. My sense is that all over the country, people are either stunned into silence or are unable to believe their eyes and ears telling them that, yes, fascism can find a home in the United States of America.

Then there’s anger. If ever in my lifetime there was at my own doorstep a reason to plait a whip and start or join a movement to raise holy hell, this is it. Now is the time. So far, my choice has been to monitor and measure my news consumption, and to communicate my issues regularly to my Congress member and senators. I don’t imagine that I can or will stop with that. I believe that the hour demands far more of me.

And that is now my problem.

What exactly is the situation calling me to do?

One of the answers to that question is what you are reading right now. It might be that no more than half a dozen people will read what you are reading now. I’m not after numbers. I’m about doing what I can when I can as effectively as I can with what I have now.

Like many things in my life, this requires a willingness to engage in some dialectical thought and action. Two very different things are in me that must come out. I’m calling them “Grace” and “Raising Hell.”

Let’s take hell-raising first. Raising hell can be noisy or quiet, hot and heavy or slow and subdued, public or quasi-private, widespread or narrowly focused. But what hell-raising cannot be is timid. It can’t kowtow to fear, shame, or wavering. I want to raise hell, and I want to raise it strategically. For example, I am not throwing money at every PAC that wants me to sign a petition so that they can then ask me for money so that they can ask me for more money so that they can keep on asking me for more money still. I’m not saying that you should follow my example, but I have decided that I neither have enough money to keep on doing that nor do I find that joining every resistance cell is either prudent or possible. As we near the mid-terms, I likely will give to a limited number of candidates. But in the meantime, there are several causes that I support (see my previous post). One of them is the Movement Voter Project. Another is the States Project. And a third is one of the organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union who are best positioned to fight the necessary legal battles shaping up.

But my real call is not to finance the resistance; it is to articulate it. Words are my métier. Communication is my gift. And anything I can do, any forum I can use, any folks I can touch thereby inspiring them to raise their own hell, that is what I am doing and will do. No books, no long speeches, no sermons, only texts, emails, phone calls, and the occasional blog entries. And I’m just getting started.

What I encourage you to do is find your own way to raise hell and then, by God, raise hell! Jessica Craven said on her Substack “Chop Wood, Carry Water” that she saw the other day in Los Angeles a lone woman walking along a highway carrying a sign. That was her way of raising hell. I doubt that I’ll do that, although I might. What I know I won’t do is spend a lot of energy and time on social media trying to argue with people with the notion of changing their minds. If that’s your thing, by all means go for it. I want to use my resources wisely, and doing so brings me to a different strategy.

But raising hell is not the only thing I want to do. I want to “say grace.” I use the phrase as part pun, part metaphor, part descriptor.. I do not want to spend my energy raising hell to feed my own ego. I don’t want to be speaking out of hate, anger, bitterness, cynicism, or any of that. I want to continue to ground myself in the essence of the Christ I follow, who is as much within me as outside of me. I want to be hospitable, loving, and caring, not just full of anger and wrath at all the horrible stuff being perpetrated by fickle politicians and power-drunk oligarchs. I want not only to say grace but to live grace.

I call this dialectical thinking and living. It is not some game of trying to remain polite while I slice people to pieces. It is about recognizing that the time calls for two things at once, two things that apparently don’t mix well. One is a desire for peace, and the other is a dedication to justice.

Raise hell for justice. And at the same time, be the peace you want the world to have.

Can it be done? Honestly, I don’t know.

But I am determined to die trying.